Writing and sharing words would superficially seem to be the same thing no matter where you write and share them.
But the number of words, the sorts of words you use, and the amount of focus (or lack thereof) folks on the other end can be expected to invest in your words changes the nature of writing and sharing: publishing a novel isn’t the same as writing short-form copy that’ll appear over a TikTok video, nor is writing a script for a long-form YouTube explainer the same as scrivening a made-for-stage play.
The same general concept applies to evolutions in presentation (shared visually on social media versus read-aloud as an audiobook) and monetization options.
On that latter point, there was a time when a few basic business models (ads/sponsors, freemium, one-off paid, subscription, and freebies-plus-things-to-buy) would cover 99% of creators’ needs once they figured out the proper fit for their work and audience.
Today, though, our communication channels are so awash with marketing messages and our budgets (especially for subscriptions) are so strained that while there have never been more and more powerful (and intuitive) tools for setting up personalized money-making infrastructure, it’s become a very winner-takes-all ecosystem in which a few success stories break through, a few more than that can make a meager living on their work, and everyone else is scrambling (despite in many cases producing incredible work) to make enough to pay for groceries.
The entities running the platforms on which the majority of creative work is shared, these days, will sometimes gesture at providing some kind of revenue based on metrics that are meaningful to their bottom lines—usually ad views and engagement, (which allows them to charge more for those ad placements)—but these additional resources also tend to accumulate with the fortunate few at the top of the pyramid, reinforcing that substantial imbalance rather than upending it.
Because of these (and similar) dynamics, there’s tension between what many of us would like to create and where we’d like to share those creations, and the sorts of things we’re being incentivized to make and where we’re encouraged to share them.
I can’t tell you how many people I know (many of whom have been very successful under the current and previous publishing paradigms) who would like to just be writing all day, but who are instead forced by the nature of this contemporary setup to spend the majority of their time making short-form videos (and similar content) to feed the algorithms that determine whether or not they’ll be able to pay their bills with (what they consider to be) their actual work.
It’s possible to ignore these systemic nudges and make whatever we want, wherever we want, however we want, of course.
But the deck is stacked against us if we don’t embrace these globe-scale Schelling Points and follow the money wherever it’s currently accreting, filtering and reshaping our work so it fits within the confines of the medium of the moment, all while hoping that something of what we wanted to say makes it into its final, ultraprocessed form.